This beloved novel from the late '50s strikes me as an Italian "Wuthering Heights." Written by a woman, Elsa Morante, it shares some of the dark, brooding, romantic qualities of Emily Bronte and also some of her plot devices: a lonely, sensitive boy who's essentially an orphan (Arturo is dark and bold and intense like the "gypsy" Heathcliff; Arturo's absentee father even calls him "Blacky"); a faith in a singular "forbidden" love as redemption (not so much a Cathy figure here, a "sister," but something close, a stepmother — both the wives of other men); a brutish, cruel male head of household; and that gloomy, romantic feeling of being physically and spiritually trapped by a rugged, isolated landscape that you alternately love and resent (here the rocky island of Procida, as remote as Bronte's English moors to a boy who has no means of escape).
It's also a coming of age story. Arturo's mother dies giving birth to him, and he is raised on goat's milk by a teenaged boy who is the servant of Arturo's father, a restless German who came to the island in his youth and who visits his son only sporadically. Arturo worships his absentee father.
"If I'd been an artist and had had epic poems, history books and so on to illustrate, I think I'd have put my father in as hero a thousand times over; and I'd have had to melt down gold dust in my paintbox, to color his hair."Eventually, the hero-father brings a barely literate young Italian girl to live on the island as his bride. He is cruel and mocking and negligent. After a brief, disturbing honeymoon — during which she becomes pregnant — he abandons her and Arturo for his mysterious travels. Arturo at first resents his stepmother, Nunziatella (she makes fresh pasta for him every day!), who is only a couple of years his senior, but gradually he falls desperately in love with her — although, having had no role model for expressing tenderness, his feelings come out all wrong. And, in any case, Nunziatella, does not return his affection, feeling duty-bound to her worthless husband. The unrequited love is the beginning of disillusionment, of growing up, of the realization that loving someone entitles you to exactly zilch. It's the beginning of realizing that one's father is only human, and, in Arturo's case — gasp! —hopelessly in love, unrequited love, with another man (explaining all those mysterious travels).
Motherless Arturo's intense worship of his father, followed by intense disillusionment, then pity, reminded me a lot of the father-son relationship in "As God Commands" (the third book I read). I think that relationship is a theme in literature in general — breaking away from the father — but perhaps the element of machismo in Italian culture gives it extra punch.
In the end, Arturo's teenaged-caretaker (he of the goat's milk) returns to Procida and he and Arturo, raised also on adventure stories (the Excellent Condottieri!), leave together to fight in World War II. He knows that Italy is on the wrong side, but like most young men with a broken heart and a lust for life he doesn't care much about "the rights and wrongs of the business."
As in "Wuthering Heights," there's little sense of the outside world in this book. Sparse mentions of the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, the gangster Al Capone, the actor Clark Gable and "space men," as well as the mention of World War II at the end, anchor the story to a point in time, but it's really timeless in essence. This island and this boy and this conflict exist in any and every century.
I love Elsa Morante's writing style. It's lush and evocative. She makes you remember the hot sun on the rocks, the craggy carob tree languishing in Arturo's courtyard, the sirocco blowing north from the Sahara, across the blue Mediterranean, enlivening the island with a dry, dreamy wind. At times the story feels a little overdone and bogged down in internal monologue, but maybe that's necessary — for authenticity! — when writing about a teenager. What the wonderful Micol says in "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" is true here: "There is no situation, however sad or boring that doesn't, basically, have some compensation, often substantial."Interesting notes: Morante, a famous novelist in her own right, was married to the even more famous Italian writer Alberto Moravia, author of "The Conformist" and other books. She was part Jewish, like him, and the two of them were forced to go into hiding during the early 1940s to escape Fascist persecution. I love this picture of them at the seaside in Capri.
Procida, Arturo's island, is a real island in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the coast of Naples. I was happy to learn this — and also that two good films, both redolent of Italy and Mediterranean architecture, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Il Postino," were shot there.
No comments:
Post a Comment